Thursday, December 15, 2011

I didn't know what to expect as I waited in the parking area at the Homestead General Aviation Airport to
board one of the chartered buses that was to take us to the Everglades
Restoration Groundbreaking Ceremony that cool January morning in 1997. I read about the ceremony being open to the public, so I decided to
drive down to and take a look at the future of the Everglades for myself.

Most of the people who boarded the bus seemed to know each other.
Members of several service clubs and growers associations chatted among
themselves as our bus drove back to Krome Avenue and then turned and
drove down the dirt access road adjacent to the C-111 canal. I watched
out the window as the bus made the short trip to the ceremony area,
thinking it was about time something was going to be done to save
Marjory Stone Douglas's wonderful "River of Grass." We disembarked and
were directed to one of several large tents that had been set up not far
from the waters edge on the other side of the canal. We walked across
the road that was created by the pumping station to the large tents set
up to accommodate the many speakers and guests.
Even
the Homestead High School Marching Band was in attendance. There were
three helicopters parked discreetly behind yellow tapes back on the
other side of the canal. I noticed that none were marked with television
station logos. A nearby metal sign showed numerous bullet holes and
dents.

The program started on time, but it didn't take long for me to wander
out of the tent and away from the social/political scene. The ceremony
was well into the speeches and remarks as I walked past the refreshment
area and over to the canal bank. I was looking in the water at the
canal's edge when two other fellows walked up, talking among themselves.
One man soon walked back to the ceremony, leaving the other alone just a
few feet away. He stood for a few moments, then reached down and pulled
a few weeds from the canal bank, and tossed them one by one into the
water. It was Dexter Lehtinen, the former U.S. Attorney who had first
filed suit against the State of Florida in 1988 for allowing polluted
water to flow into the Everglades. Lehtinen's suit, along with the
thirty-nine additional lawsuits the original lawsuit triggered, actually
began the legal actions that eventually led to the ceremony we were
attending. It appeared he also would rather be fishing.

We started chatting about Florida and the Everglades, and finally about
the Everglades ceremony behind us. He would occasionally glance back at
the crowd to see if he was missed, but was far more content to toss
weeds in the water. It was one of those times when the bus ride was
worth it. Dexter's wife, U.S. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (who
at the time was a State Representative) sponsored my daughter, Monica,
to serve as her page for a week in the Florida Legislature in
Tallahassee. We met the Lehtinens while giving our daughter her sendoff
at Miami International Airport. He politely "remembered" meeting us,
even though it had been ten or eleven years earlier. Shortly, others who
had seen Dexter and wanted to say hello joined us, so I made my goodbye
and slowly wandered back to the main tent in time to hear the Honorable
Dante Fascell begin his speech.

The program had him listed as Mr. Dante Fascell, Esq. as he had retired
from 38 years of service in the U.S. House Representatives some five
years earlier. Somehow, after all those years, it just didn't seem
right not to say Honorable. I listened intently as Mr. Fascell soon
strayed from the political correctness that earmarked all the other
speakers. He soon was talking to the people assembled in the tent as if
we were all family. Everyone remembers him saying, "...seems to like to
me we've been discussing the same thing now for about 50 years... There
is only one way to get this thing done, and that is for everybody to
work together...” Those comments are still heard today whenever
Everglades restoration is discussed.

Mr. Fascell also reminisced about the flooding that swamped Greater
Miami after the hurricane of the late 1940's. My uncle had told us about
rowboats being used to pick up people during one flood, so I knew Mr.
Fascell wasn't exaggerating when he repeated similar stories all over
Miami. It was his duty to the people of south Florida to not let that
happen again. He and others in political power implemented the
legislation needed to protect the citizens of south Florida with a
series of drainage canals and dikes. The resulting flood prevention
construction by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was exactly the reason
the Everglades had deteriorated to its present state. It wasn't done by
accident or through stupidity. It was a deliberate plan to protect the
citizens. It was, and remains a very effective flood control program.
Now we have a different set of goals and ideals. While we can never
restore the Everglades to it's original state, we can restore portions
of it and reclaim much of its lost beauty while maintaining the safety
of the citizens of south Florida.

I caught one of the last buses back to the parking lot, thinking maybe I
should attend more of these government ceremonies. I had answers to
questions that had been bothering me for years and had finally accepted
the answers as something I would have done too, if that had been my
responsibility. Besides, it was fun tossing weeds into the water,
something everybody should do every once in a while.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

I envy artists. You
know, the people who put their talents, and quite often their very
souls, right in front of you to see. You see their effort, their
product, their thoughts and interpretations as they meant you to see
them as soon as there are created or unveiled. I, however, am a
lowly writer. My product, as individual and original as I intend,
never gets to the printed page without someone altering what I
create. When I use my fingers and my wit to translate my verbal
image into a permanent record, no one but me see can see the
original. Even the original is only a nebulous thought that often
contorts and becomes a victim of intellectual metamorphosis.
Sometimes an entire thought is swept away by a simple distraction,
lost forever. Like the purpose of this paragraph! Seriously, I have
often wished a thought could miraculously appear on my computer
screen before I compound what I was trying to say! If I only had a
paint brush!

Editors can say I didn't
following grammatical protocol when I used the blue oil from my
palette. It should have had more green than yellow because my color
simply shouldn't look like that. That is regardless of the image
I, and I alone, created, but they can not see because they have to
focus their vision through the eyepiece of academia.

Maybe it is my shadowing.
It simply can't be applied in the corners of my description because
of some 18th century rule about gerunds, or infinitives,
or some other idiosyncratic restriction that detracts from the image
I alone want to portray. When Henry Alford wrote in his 1864 book,
The Queen's English, he
admonished writers from splitting infinitives. It is a good thing
the writers from Star Trek weren't looking at the past when they
wrote “to boldly go where no one has gone before.” And the
restriction against beginning a sentence with a conjunction sucks,
too! Sometimes my image only has one word! There! That blasts the
idiom rule and the one word sentence restriction rather easily.
Perhaps that is the problem. No one but me can see the image
I create. Or is it, I alone can see the image I create? How do I
get my image to you without corruption? How do I get it in print
without being filtered, trimmed, or perhaps simply misinterpreted
completely? If someone plays with an interpretation, alters it and
makes it their own, it would be is as if every sculpture, every
monument would have the corrections of a critic applied before you
see it. Every statue would have a plaster patch stuck on somewhere.
Every painting would be touched up, color corrected before being hung
on a galley wall. In writing, the editor is the critic who controls
the creative results that end up in front of you, the reader. I
apply my creation to a mechanical medium and find immediately it must
conform to certain constraints and limits.

Without an editor, an
author has little chance in the literary world. You may purchase a
work of art based on your tastes regardless of a critic's comments.
As long as I have an editor, however, there is a chance you may not
see what I saw. My image then belongs solely to me. Can I get it to
you without sounding like an uneducated cretin? Certainly, but you
have to like the box it comes in. And I didn't get to design the
box. How I envy artists!

But now the World Wide
Web offers a resource unlike any other in mankind's history. One
that allows anyone with a computer and access to the Internet the
ability to offer the electronic world pages of writing that can be
read anywhere in the world at any time. Entire books are written,
shipped and read all over the world without using a single piece of
paper! The written products by-pass the editors and are delivered
directly to the critics, the ones who read, or delete, what ever is
available. Readers, bloggers, and down-loaders have become the de
facto editors. Writers have a brand new medium! We even get to
design our own boxes.

"I Envy Artists" was published in the "The Florida Writer" Vol 5, No. 2, 2011